In both the sculptures from the mid-1990s, and the new drawings created for the exhibition Players, Huma Bhabha reinvents the human head, deconstructing and reconstructing an archetype in which she gathers and transforms various art-historical typologies: from the African, Oceanic and carnival masks to those worn by the actors/dancers in the Indian theatre, from the grotesque faces of Expressionist painting to the demonic, hybrid features we may find in the characters of science-fiction movies or the Marvel comic books.

The practice of inscribing a face with multiple meanings is evident in Huma Bhabha’s recent pastels of imaginary portraits, which in their iconography hark back to and build on precisely her masks of the 1990s.e-flux » Announcements